Why The Conflicts Are Dragging On:

We’re Being out-stupided

I have the feeling that we’re all suffering from a curious kind of warfare fatigue; both conflicts seem to be dragging on with no end in sight, just more of the same. I know I certainly am.

There are two causes. To a great extent we get the impression from history that wars have quick and tidy endings. As in: we dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Japan surrendered immediately; Grant and Lee met at the Appomattox Court House and presto, the war was over. Not only is that not the case, but it requires a certain amount of digging to uncover how the endings played out.

In the two wars at hand, there’s an additional problem which no one wants to talk about, or even acknowledge, but here it is, and I’ll present it as a classical syllogism: Marxists don’t understand numbers or facts. The men in charge of Russia at virtually ever level were by definition educated in the Soviet system of Marxism-Leninism. Therefore they can’t grasp how badly they’re losing.

The problem in the Middle East is basically a subset of the first. Islam is a religion. All religions have sects with different interpretations. The sect that’s currently causing problems has two characteristics: it believes it’s destined to conquer everyone, and insofar as it has incorporated modern ideas, those are based on Marxist ideas. So the same conclusion applies.

I should add an explanatory note here regarding Marxism. The primary source of Marxism for the sect was fascism, which was explicitly and openly socialist, which in turn was Marxist.

The claim that communism and socialism are two different systems is in itself an example of the phenomenon I mentioned above: religions always have sects. And to put the matter simply: the official name of the Soviet Union, was “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” As we say down here in Third World, you can call a sheep a goat, but it’s still a sheep.

Here’s the part about my first statement that’s extremely hard to get your mind wrapped around. It’s not that the leaders actually know what the real number is and lie about it. They themselves have no idea what the number is. When Nikita Sregeyevch Khrushchev came to power, he was very suspicious of the official data for the grain harvest. So he commissioned a group of experts to find out the real figure. Their conclusion was that it was unknowable: way too many people had been making up numbers to ensure they’d met their quotas for so long that no one knew.

But analyzing bogus numbers can be done, and lead to interesting conclusions. In 1982, Murray Feshbach, in The Soviet Union: Population Trend and Dilemmas, (Population Bulletin, 37.2) observed that “Soviet demographic problems are interwoven with the country’s serious economic problems.” Earlier, Emmanuel Todd, in La chute final: essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, [1975]) had forecast that the USSR would most likely collapse by the late 1980s, based on the consistences from one data set with another.

A simple example. In the early 1940s, when you compared the official production figures for tanks with the official figures steel production, since we knew how much steel was required in the production of tanks, it was easy to see that the USSR wasn’t producing enough steel to make all the tanks it claimed it was producing, as a post Soviet Russian analysis explained

And currently, the analyst at China Observer engages in pretty much the same kind of reasoning, pointing out that the claims about the economy made in one report simply can’t be correct according to the data in another one. Sure: the numbers don’t reflect reality, which takes us back to the original observation about the various kinds of Marxists.

So it’s hardly surprising that in both cases the losers (Russia and the Shia) are still hanging on. They not only don’t understand the evidence of the numbers, the don’t know what the “real” numbers are, or why they’re significant

So in this post I’m going to summarize, or recap, where we are right now, and then point to some current developments that I believe are significant in bringing both wars to a conclusion, even though they’re largely going unmentioned.

Since I’ve been writing about the Ukrainian War since it started nearly three years ago, I’ll begin with that.

The Failures of the Russian Military

When Russia launched its invasion in February of 2022, the consensus among the supposed experts was that Moscow would win in a matter of a few months. I was one of the very few military historians who argued the contrary: the Russians were going to have a difficult time of it.

I wasn’t just being contrarian, or making a lucky guess. Rather I was arguing on the basis of thirty years of studying the European wars, which had led me to the conclusion that a great many of the claims and assessments that formed the conventional wisdom were deeply flawed, and in each case (basically in a series of books) I explained why.

In this specific case—the widespread conventional estimates of the strength and effectiveness of the Red Army—all the actual evidence went to the contrary. The Leninist-Stalinist armies had engaged in four wars starting in November of 1917 when they attempted to regain control of the old empire’s four Baltic states and Poland, foment a revolution in Germany. That attempt ended up—by 1921—in a full scale war against the new Polish state, which Stalin, who was in charge, lost. In 1938, Stalin’s invasion of Finland ended in a bloody draw.

And although Stalin, who had an extremely powerful and effective propaganda campaign, turned the 1941-1945 war against Hitler into a great victory, when you looked past the propaganda, the USSR only survived because of massive Allied aid to Moscow and the rather obvious fact that National Socialist Germany was fighting a war on multiple fronts: in the air against Allied bomber attacks, in North Africa, and then in Italy and France.

Moreover, both in the period right before the collapse of the Soviet Union and then afterwards, their armies had a difficult time, first in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya. In the latter case, Russia was eventually able to reconquer Chechnya, but it took two bloody wars

Interestingly, it was a former Soviet general, Dimitri Antonovich Volkogonov, who in 1988 who provided the first insight into why, when he wrote that Stalin

was oblivious of the fundamental principle of the military art, namely, that the objective should be gained at minimal cost in human life.

Additionally, Volkogonov, who had access to the Kremlin archives, observed that Soviet war dead in the Great Patriotic War, came to 26-27 million, or about sixteen percent of the population, including 157,593 soldiers sentenced to death during 1941-42 for “panic mongering, cowardice, and unauthorized abandonment of the field of battle.” Figures that not only support his characterization of Stalin’s abysmal military ignorance, but hardly suggest an effective military.

The general also calculated that between 1919 and 1953, between 19.5 and 22 Soviet citizens died as a result of Soviet repressions. Put the two figures together, and the Soviet population lost somewhere between a quarter and a third of its population under communism. I bring these figures up to suggest both the necessity for mythologizing the victories of World War Two, and how those fictions prevented the post-Soviet military from adapting to the developments in modern warfare that took place in the west afterwards, and particularly in the quarter of a century preceding the 2022 invasion.

Stalin’s mythology didn’t just doom the Soviet empire, it doomed others to follow it. Here’s a key example. In 1997, the Agence France Presse reported an announcement by the Vietnamese government of the deaths in the Indochinese war.

According to Hanoi, there were nearly two million civilian deaths in the North and another two million in the South. As to the “combats properly considered,” the figures were 1.1 million military dead and 600,000 wounded. [my translation]

Since a quarter of a century had passed since the end of the war, and since the announcement apparently only appeared in French, and given the effective propaganda circulating in the west, it was largely ignored,

However, when you compare Hanoi’s announcement with official Allied losses, we see some interesting results. For the entire war, the Allies won the casualty exchange by 4:1. For the “Tet Offensive” of 1968, which was widely proclaimed to be an American defeat, the exchange ration was 10:1. It was probably even more lopsided, as some portion of the four million “civilians” were actively involved in the fighting.

It’s difficult to calculate the precise ratio for the Red Army on the Eastern Front, bu it was most likely somewhere between 8:1 and 10:1, and after nearly four years of fighting in Ukraine, the ratio is at least 5:1. But when you don’t understand numbers, you definitely can’t understand ratios.

When your combat deaths are that imbalanced, arguments about the power of your military are ludicrous: all they establish is that Stalin’s obliviousness was as contagious as it was disastrous.

Now in a whole series of posts for the last few years I’ve explained all the Russian failures in detail, but what they amount to is a system failure to adjust their tactics, their doctrine, and their strategy to modern warfare. Nor has there been much in the way of adjustment during the war.

<The Current Situation

In terms of combat, the Russians have lost so many soldiers, and so much of their equipment, that their capabilities are getting steadily more feeble. But at the same time, the Ukrainian strikes against the Russian infrastructure have steadily expanded. Currently Ukrainian long range drones are striking key targets from sic to nine hundred miles behind the lines. Initially, the strikes concentrated almost entirely on military targets (fuel and ammunition depots, command and control centers, and air defenses). But by the summer of this year, the drones had started hitting Russian oil refineries. Over half of Russia’s 38 refineries had been hit—some multiple times, resulting in an estimated loss of forty percent of the country’s refining capacity.

Although strikes on refineries are continuing, in recent months the emphasis has sifted to the country’s electrical sub-stations. There about fifty of those, and they’re the all important link that enables the electricity that’s being generated to reach the users. Not just homes and so forth, but factories and the transportation system. Russia is heavily dependent on railroads for distribution of resources, and most of the key routes are electrified, as is the case in western Europe.

It’s only going to get worse, because both sets of targets are easy to damage or destroy. That is, it doesn’t require a massive bomber raid or dozens of missiles to inflict serious damage or even put the facility out of commission.

But as I said at the start, with my remark about not grasping facts and figures, the leadership doesn’t grasp what’s happening.

The only insight they have is that if they keep claiming they have new and terrible nuclear weapons, they can scare everyone into submission. A helpful hint in this regard: they’ve been making these claims for years, and none of them work, either as advertised or at all.

However, to end this on a more positive note (finally!), it appears that Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister whose wild threats and claims have been a constant feature of Russian foreign policy, has been purged. The rumor is that Putin blames him for the collapse of negotiations with the US. If so, that’s good news. Assuming. Color me skeptical.

The Ceasefire in the Middle East

At the moment the situation is roughly this. Hamas is attempting to keep control over the portion of Gaza not under Israeli control, Iran is doing the same thing for their country, and Hezbollah is still making sporadic and unsuccessful attempts to move back into southern Lebanon. Although supposedly Beirut was to disarm Hezbollah and its affiliates or partners by the end of the year, I can’t find anyone who believes that will actually happen.

But as far as any sort of military threat goes, these groups have all been left high and dry, owing to the American and Israeli attack on Iran and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.

I think these violations are largely a function of the nature of these groups. As I’ve argued from the start, Hamas, Hezbollah, and so forth are basically criminal gangs, so with the loss of the original leaders, isolated individuals and groups are still causing trouble. I’m not denying that the survivors in the leadership are just as committed to killing all the Jews they can, as they’ve always been. But their control over the various gangs, which was basically a function of Iranian cash and weaponry, has disappeared. To use an example in our own history: when Al Capone was arrested, tried, and convicted, it wasn’t like criminal activity in Chicago came to an end.

I think the best evidence of that for Hamas is the seen in the delays in releasing the remains of the hostages. While the leadership that’s left would love to drag this out as long as they can, I think at bottom what’s going on is that they never had control of them in the sense everyone assumed.

We saw this with the Hamas claims about all the civilian casualties they were claiming the IDF had caused. The problem with this sort of fabrication is reality gets lost. It’s not like the men in charge know what the situation really is and just lie about it.

But since each isolated instance meets with a quick and devastating response from the IDF—both in Gaza and in Lebanon—just as it did in Syria after the collapse, eventually the incidents decline into insignificance.

Of course there’s no shortage of outsiders sympathetic to the “Palestinian” cause. And a good many of them are behaving as though they’d just be delighted to see not just Israel, but the Jews, disappear off the face of the earth.

But when you look at these countries, in each case, the current governments are only remaining in power by a thread, and their economies are a shambles. For example, the current president of France has an approval rating of eleven percent. The governing labour party in the UK is almost at the bottom of the polling of the various parties. And currently, the UK’s GDP is barely on a par with Mississippi’s.

And so on down the list. As Stalin retorted when one of his minions expressed concern about the opposition of the Pope. “How many divisions does he have?” Just because he was wicked doesn’t mean he was stupid.

But a lot of people who aren’t wicked, don’t seem to have a very firm grasp on reality.